Bilphena is an interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and restorative justice practitioner based in Baltimore.
She founded Archive Liberia in 2020 as an invitation and site for recovering, holding and organizing the collective memory of Liberia.
2024 YAA Advisor and 2025 YAA Facilitator
Bry is a scholar, writer, and educator from Baltimore, MD. In 2020, Reed earned her Bachelor’s in Africana Studies with a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Both disciplines allow her to focus her study to Black feminist scholarship. Her work explores the lives experiences of Black people by examining literature and culture. Her academic work connects to her freelance writing as she explores the histories, culture, and art of Black women and girls across the world.
2024 + 2025 YAA Advisor and BFFS Facilitator
Being a native of West Baltimore has taught Artist Ernest Shaw the meaning of perseverance, community and integrity. As a product of Baltimore City Public Schools, Baltimore School for the Arts, Morgan State University and Howard University Shaw recognizes the importance of using his skills and talents for the betterment of others, not simply for his own self-aggrandizement. For Ernest, teaching is also an artistic medium. Ernest has been an educator for over two decades.
2024 YAA Advisor
Jordan is a self taught lens based artist originally from Peoria, Illinois. Jordan uses photography and film to synthesize both archival and contemporary imagery to articulate the mundane within the Black queer landscape and exist as an altar to the lived experience.
2024 YAA Program Manager and 2025 YAA Advisor
Maurice is a visual artist based in Baltimore, MD, with a passion for guiding emerging artists. Drawing from years of experience in his artistic practice, dedicated to sharing the wisdom, and knowledge gained to help others navigate their creative journeys, and build sustainable artistic careers.
2025 YAA Advisor
Nia is a Baltimore-born poet, filmmaker, arts educator, movement artist, and author of Paper Trails of the Undying. Named Best Poet (2020) and Best Filmmaker (2023) by Baltimore Magazine, her films—A Black Girl's Country and The Unveiling of God / a love letter to my forefathers—have screened nationally and internationally, with the former acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her works are taught in schools and universities nationwide. Honored with the Black Arts District’s Women of Impact Award (2022), the Rubys Artist Grant (2023), and a Saul Zaentz Fellowship (2024), June’s art centers the Black Baltimore experience.
2024 + 2025 YAA Advisor and Facilitator + BFFS Facilitator
Taj is a Philadelphia native, is currently based in Baltimore, where he recently earned his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art's LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting. He holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, which he completed in 2018, and he was a selected nominee for the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art. Over the years, he has developed a distinctive artistic practice that combines painting, collaging, and the use of pyrography, resulting in a unique body of work. This innovative approach has earned him recognition as an award-winning artist, including the Bertha Lear Painting Award, the Mural Arts Black Artist Grant and Fellowship, the LeRoy E. Hoffberger Fellowship, and, most recently, the Congressional Black Caucus Artist Award. Taj has also been awarded in multiple juried exhibitions, with a recent prize from Delaware County Community College in Pennsylvania.
2025 YAA Advisor
Shan is a nomadic award-winning interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and image-maker, from Baltimore, MD. Wallace utilizes a range of mediums to weave narratives and imagine new stories. Rooted in image-making techniques such as photography, film, and collage, as well as in situ installations, these mediums serve as the foundation of her artistic practice
2024 YAA Advisor
Faith is a photographer, educator, and curator whose work illuminates the Black memory landscape and the mundane. She received her BFA in Photography from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2019 and has exhibited her work internationally. She has most notably exhibited at New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles, the ICP, the Nasher Museum at Duke, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Aperture Foundation in NYC and more. In addition to Fine Art Photography she also works editorially, showcasing photographs in the WSJ, NYT, and more. Most recently, Couch is a Forbes Magazine 30 under 30 in Art and Style honoree.
2024 YAA Facilitator
Bashi is a filmmaker, teaching artist, theatre artist, and musician. He has performed and/or had work produced or screened at venues including Centerstage in Baltimore, Theatre Project, Creative Alliance, the Schomburg Center in Harlem, VH1 Soul, New York City Fringe Festival, D.C. Hip-Hop Theater Festival, the Lafayette Theatre in New York City, Black Panther Party Film Festival, Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival, the San Francisco Black Film Festival, Baltimore Museum of Art, High Zero Festival, Mind On Fire, and Elastic Arts in Chicago.
2025 YAA Facilitator and BFFS Facilitator
Angela is an accomplished writer, curator, and art historian who is deeply dedicated to exploring the legacies and cultural expressions of the African Diaspora. With an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) and a BA in Visual Arts from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Carroll’s academic and professional journey is marked by her commitment to amplifying the voices of dynamic artists. Her writing appears in key arts publications, including Hyperallergic and ARTS.BLACK, Sugarcane Magazine, Black Art in America, Saint Heron, BmoreArt, and FOAM. She brings an insightful, critical voice to issues of art history, culture, and archival.
2024 + 2025 YAA Facilitator and BFFS Facilitator
Rhea is a curator and fifth-generation educator whose work is dedicated to knowledge sharing and fostering collaboration. Rhea is the founder of the Black Artist Research Space, a platform for artists. Rhea holds a BA in Art from Fisk University and an MFA in Curatorial Practice from MICA. Rhea is classically trained pianist and vocalist, she sings in four languages and was a member of the Fisk Jubilee Singers from 2009 to 2013.
2024 + 2025 YAA Facilitator
Webster Phillips III is an archivist and historian managing the I henry Photo Collection.
2025 YAA Facilitator
Dr. Webb is the Assistant Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Center for Digital Humanities. She recently founded the We Live Language (WLL) lab within Black Beyond Data, a Computational Humanities and Social Sciences ecosystem. The WLL lab is centered on the writings and spoken word of Afro-diasporic poets, authors, and philosophers, exploring the intricate relationship between language and power.
2024 + 2025 YAA Facilitator
Kirby is a lifelong artist from West Baltimore. He began in spoken word and acting before teaching himself filmmaking during the DSLR boom. Since then, he’s shot for BET, HBO, and Revolt TV, with collaborations with Bradford Young, Arthur Jafa, Terence Nance, and others. Though he works in L.A., he remains rooted in Baltimore where he continues to tell Black stories with depth, dignity, and vision
2025 YAA Studio Visit Host
Sidney Clifton is an Emmy-nominated producer Sidney Clifton has over 20 years in animation and live-action, with credits including Celebration Table with Maya Angelou, Tripping the Rift, Hellboy: Sword of Storms, and BET’s Marvel’s Black Panther. She is Senior VP of Animation and Mixed Media at the Jim Henson Company, Senior Consultant with Black Women Animate Studios, and a frequent mentor at leading art schools. In 2020, she launched The Clifton House, a writer’s and artist’s retreat in her childhood Baltimore home honoring her parents, educator Fred J. Clifton and poet Lucille Clifton.
2025 YAA Facilitator
Joël Díaz is a writer, educator, and arts steward with extensive experience in arts administration, public programming, and publishing. From 2020–2023, he served as the inaugural director of SCAD Museum of Art’s Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies, where he expanded public knowledge of Black Diasporic culture and produced award-winning programs and films. He has held roles at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Pioneer Works, and the Museum of the City of New York, with writing published in The Nation, The Feminist Wire, and Interviewing the Caribbean. A 2018 Poet’s House Fellow, Joël also advises publishers and educational organizations. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing, an MA in Educational Leadership, and a BA in American Studies & Juvenile Justice, and is currently Director of Programs at The Clifton House.
2025 YAA Facilitator
Savannah Wood is an artist with deep roots in Baltimore and Los Angeles. Wood works primarily in photography, text and installation to explore how spirituality, domesticity, and our relationships to place shape our identities. Her projects reconnect people with the everyday beauty of our world and the histories that lie hidden below the surface.
As the Executive Director of Afro Charities, Wood is leading the charge to increase access to the 130+-year-old AFRO American Newspapers’ extensive archives. In this role, she has shepherded the organization through a period of historic growth, initiated new programming, and attracted support from national funders including the Mellon Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Ruth Foundation.
2024 + 2025 YAA Facilitator
Deyane Moses is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and curator living in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2019, she exposed the hidden racist history of the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her innovative archive, "The Maryland Institute Black Archive," along with a groundbreaking exhibition and compelling demonstration, effectively brought the issue of institutional racism to a broader audience. In 2020, Deyane established Blackives, LLC, a platform dedicated to serving Black communities with research, archival expertise, design services, and transformative programs. Currently, Deyane serves as the Curator of Archives at AFRO Charities Inc.
2024 + 2025 YAA Facilitator
Jessica Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a historian of Atlantic slavery and the African diaspora. She is the award-winning author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (2020) and is currently working on two new books with Liveright (W. W. Norton).
An internationally recognized digital humanist, she directs LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and co-leads projects including Black Beyond Data and the Mellon-funded Diaspora Solidarities Lab. Her widely cited essay “Markup Bodies” and her co-editing of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities highlight her impact, alongside publications in Slavery & Abolition, The Black Scholar, Meridians, American Quarterly, Social Text, and more.
2024 + 2025 YAA Facilitator
Megan Lewis is a multidisciplinary illustrator and creator of the wearable brand Blk Women Period. Her work, rooted in bold colors and images of Black women, reflects social, historical, and cultural narratives. A prominent member of Baltimore’s arts community, she has served as an Art@Work teaching artist for four years and completed seven city murals, including Lady Liberty Please Know Thy Self, which gained international attention when visited by Alicia Keys. Lewis’s first public art commission, the North Avenue Rising project, follows major collaborations with the Baltimore Orioles, Target, LIFEWTR, and the University of Maryland Medical System. Her 2019 commission marks the first new artwork for the Baltimore Metro in over 30 years—and the first by a Black woman artist in the system—placing her among renowned artists like Romare Bearden and Mary Ann Mears.
2024 YAA Studio Visit Host
Ada Pinkston is a multimedia artist, educator, and organizer based in Baltimore. Her work explores social sciences, global colonial histories, American Studies, and community art practices. For over a decade, she has taught in traditional and nontraditional K–12 settings. Her art has been featured at The Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Walters Art Museum, The New Museum, Light City Baltimore, and internationally in Berlin, Orlando, and New York. Pinkston is a Baker Artist Award semifinalist (2016) and recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Grit Fund (2017) and Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby’s Project Grant (2017). A graduate of Wesleyan University (B.A.) and MICA (M.F.A.), she has lectured at The French Embassy, NYU, UCLA, and The National Gallery of Art. She is also co-founder of LabBodies Performance Art Laboratory in Baltimore.
2025 YAA Studio Visit Host
Anna Divinagracia is a lens-based interdisciplinary artist whose work draws from her experiences growing up in the Philippines and coming of age in Baltimore. Born in 1997 in Davao City, she uses her art to explore love, destiny, home, identity, and the Filipino American immigrant experience. She holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Morgan State University and is currently a resident artist at Creative Alliance, Baltimore, while working as Digital Marketing Coordinator at Chesapeake Arts Center. Her work has been featured in Suboart Magazine, Bmore Art, Womanly Magazine, and Subvrt Magazine, and exhibited in galleries across Baltimore, Towson University, and the Umbrella Art Fair in Washington.
2025 YAA Studio Visit Host
Bria is a Baltimore-based photographer and collage artist whose work combines found imagery, print media, and fabrics to explore the Black experience. A 2021 B.F.A. graduate of Towson University, her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in Scotland, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, D.C., and Baltimore. Her work has appeared in BmoreArt, Contemporary Collage, EBONY, and Black Collagists: The Book. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore.
2025 YAA Studio Visit Host
Jerrell Gibbs’s bright, contemplative portraits of Black sitters thrum with a vivid sense of place. The Baltimore-based artist renders his subjects and their backgrounds—which range from intimate domestic settings to lush natural landscapes—with an equal sense of care. He imbues every brushstroke with a sense of emotional and personal specificity. Gibbs often works from Polaroids, transforming specific, banal moments into scenes of powerful emotional resonance.
2025 YAA Studio Visit Host
Murjoni Merriweather uses art, especially claywork to create and talk about black culturethrough sculpted beings that are based around real people and real experiences. Her work addresses and eliminates stereotypes through clay portraits and video work. With this, she enjoys going against the European standards of “beauty” that are placed upon people of color. (light skin, petite figure,etc.), and normalizing what is natural about black bodies; loving and accepting them as they come.
2025 YAA Studio Visit Host
Saj Dillard is an urban farmer and community advocate. She owns Sajeeda Urban Farm, located in West Baltimore, primarily focused on beekeeping and the cultivation and management of a community farm. She's been in the urban farming community in Baltimore City for the last 4 years and has extensive experience across a broad range of areas.
2025 BFFS Facilitator
Jen White-Johnson (she/they) is a distinguished Afro-Latina artist, activist, designer, and educator, whose creative expressions delve into the intersection of content and caregiving. With a profound focus on reshaping ableist visual culture, Jen, an artist-educator grappling with Graves disease and ADHD, brings a heart-centered and electric approach to disability advocacy.
2025 BFFS Facilitator
Ciarra K. Walters (1992) is a visual artist and educator based in Prince George's County, Maryland. She received her MFA in Photography + Media & Society from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2024. Her practice examines the body as a site of agency, self-discovery, and environmental resonance through an interdisciplinary approach using performance, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. She uses materials like wire, eggshells, and nylons, blurring the boundaries between the self and the environment.
2025 YAA Artist Talk Moderator and 2025 BFFS Facilitator
